“There is no one way to hit,” Yelich said in October 2018. Nor is there one way to develop players.

pitches.’”

The accumulation of deliberate practice—focused work with intent—is the key to quicker achievement of expertise.

“When I came there and saw our player-development goals, I was like, oh my word. This is stuff you can’t work on,” Fast says. “It was stuff like, ‘Improve your command.’ How’s a pitcher supposed to go into the off-season and improve his command? He needs a drill. He needs to know how to measure if he’s getting better.”

ASTRONAUTS

player

Cultural critic Maria Popova writes that with a fixed mindset, “avoiding failure at all costs becomes a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled,” whereas a growth mindset regards failure not as evidence of stupidity or lack of ability but as a “heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

The new kind of coach, Mejdal says, would be, “more technologically [and] quantitatively savvy than a conventional coach… someone who can throw [batting practice] and also write a SQL query.”

These rare birds of baseball, fluent in front office and dipped in dugout wisdom, are “perfect conduits to get a message from high theoretical guys down to guys who are just used to grinding it out on the baseball field,” San Diego Padres manager Andy Green said in 2017. “Unless that message gets translated where a guy speaks both languages, it